Open Source Bridge 2013 sessions

When our company was acquired we needed a way to see everything that was done each day all in one place. Teams were using different methods to do this: standups, written reports, emails and meetings. Nothing stuck.
Done reports introduces a simple IRC command: !done. Team members say !done and what they just did. These !dones are put into a daily report. !done becomes a part of everyday at work, not a strained task that’s easily forgotten.

If you care about a project or cause, but fear adding individual fundraising to your business plan, come to this long-form workshop. By the end, you will enthusiastically seek out opportunities to ask for money and know how to build a strong community of support over time.

Wikipedia’s innovative language and mobile engineering projects use agile development to create high-quality features and apps in faster iterations. This talk examines what works and what doesn’t when using agile development for large open source projects. This talk will help developers and engineering managers better implement a successful agile process for their open source projects.

Have you heard about functional programming but not sure what all the fuss is about? Learn about the basic concepts of functional programming, writing functions in Scala, and the functional approach to working with collections supported by Scala's collections library. Learn about the benefits of a functional approach to programming even when you're not fully adopting a functional style. Scala is a language that allows mixing the object-oriented and functional approaches. No prior knowledge of Scala is required to enjoy this talk.

Bugmasters from Wikimedia, Mozilla, and GNOME argue entertainingly about bug management. We shall reveal our best Bugzilla hacks as well as waxing philosophical about open source project developer communities!

Online deliberation refers to applications which help communities make decisions. This varies from Exploratory deliberation, like Amazon reviews, where an individual makes a decision by consulting their community, to very structured Decision Making deliberations where a community needs to forge a single legally and logically defensible decision.

How are open source projects like symphonies? In this session, we will review leadership strategies and insights gained from conducting non-profit amateur performing ensembles. We will discuss how to coordinate and lead teams of volunteers in both top-down and self-governing organizations.

I'll be covering the technology that is now being used for the largest scale systems and how that technology is used, how it is connected, and how it keeps large volumes of data available for everything from genomic research, mass e-commerce processing or keeping medical data safe from loss.

Open source software engineering and user interface design got off on the wrong foot. Sadly it’s holding our projects back from reaching their full potential. Let’s talk about how we can bring these seemingly incompatible disciplines together in perfect harmony by simply learning each other’s craft, and how to get started doing so. Whether you are an engineer or a designer you will learn where to get started and how to have fun doing it.

Ever wonder what you don't know about how your computer hardware really works? Do you tire of lying to your relatives that "gremlins" are the cause of intermittent data loss and blue screens, and not just a car from the 1970s? Let's take a journey into the wonderful world of wonky hardware and find out what can be done about it!

A few stories we will cover:
* 20% women attendees at PyCon US 2013
* 85% of JSConf attendees donated to women in open tech/culture
* The success of Black Girls Code
* Conferences with 100% white male speakers are now called out for not trying hard enough to find good speakers
* Mozilla's adoption of community guidelines that prevent advocacy of discrimination on Planet Mozilla and other Mozilla forums
* The rapid growth of PyLadies

Everybody today has heard of electric vehicles, yet almost nobody has ever seen one, touched one, or driven one. I think this is a shame and would like to correct that. Come join me for 45 minutes of explanation and demonstration about the basics of electric vehicles from electric bicycles all the way to passenger vehicles. Building these vehicles at home is easily within the realm of anybody unafraid to pick up a few simple tools and learn a few basic concepts.

I believe empathy is the core competency that is missing from much of the efforts to push the tech community in a direction towards more diversity of all kinds. Companies, communities and conferences cannot expect everything to magically change until they're willing to go deep and examine the systemic patterns and structures that keep underrepresented communities from feeling safe and welcome in the tech space.

Projects fail. Companies crash and burn. Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfect place. Just because it happens doesn’t mean we can’t do our best to prevent it or—at the very least—to minimize the damage when it does. As a matter of fact, embracing failure can be one of the best things you do for your organization.

This talk is about my experience with promoting Wikipedia in Indian languages, OpenGLAM projects in India and the problems I've encountered. I also want to draw parallels to how the encyclopedia project itself, especially online works on notions of rough consensus, thereby articulating a specific political position for the community and reflecting a world view through the knowledge they produce.

Hands-on Bugzilla wrassling, Firefox busting, barrel riding showdown. Enter the dazzling gladiatorial arena of BUG TRIAGE with MOZILLA! We will make bugzilla.mozilla.org accounts, practice reading and understanding bug reports, discuss why and how to investigate and add information to bugs, explore searches and reports, and feel the glorious feeling of contributing to open access to information and awesome browsers for all!

FirefoxOS is Mozilla's response to the problems that it sees with the mobile space. Walled gardens, platform fragmentation, and single-purpose SDKs in non-web programming languages threaten to close off the open web from the mobile space. In this presentation I will be covering the basics of FirefoxOS, and how it is the only mobile OS that answers to nobody but you.

Testing User Interfaces is hard! FiveUI [1] is here to help. While FiveUI happens to provide a handy framework for doing headless and interactive UI testing; it is really intended for sharing tests and sharing a framework for executing them.
FiveUI consists of a browser extension (for Firefox and Google Chrome), a headless batch system, and a set of UI consistency guidelines. The guidelines are written in JSON and Javascript such that they remain readable and understandable to human developers, without being tied to a specific application. The guidelines can be checked on an individual web page by hand using the browser extensions, or on an entire website using the headless system.
[1] http://galoisinc.github.com/FiveUI/

When I was asked to teach Ruby on Rails at Columbia University I observed that a significant number of the skills required to become a successful professional in the industry are acquired on the job and aren’t being taught in school.

Getting into Software Defined Radio (SDR) used to require extensive
hardware knowledge, but easy-to-use platforms like HackRF are changing
that. The GNU Radio software framework is also easier to work with than
it once was. I'll show you how to get started with the software side of
SDR and cover the essential techniques needed to discover, analyze, and
produce radio signals with GNU Radio and HackRF.

We'll look at methods for evaluating business ideas with a focus on business strategy. We will see how building a business on Open Source changes the equation and will look at the many mistakes I made with Elevated Code.

My children have patiently tolerated a number of teach-STEM-quick schemes their dad has brought home. They've taught robots to dance, created simple animations using Scratch, and, quite frankly, made a lot of poop jokes.
What's missing from these programming tools was storytelling. The ones we tried focused either on easy interactivity or expressive power. If only there were a way to combine the two... oh, wait, there was—46 years ago!

Thank you! I'm glad someone read the description of this talk on line and remembered to answer Aardvark -- if you hadn't done that, the excerpt wouldn't have actually been part of the talk, and the very fabric of reality could have been threatened!

As technical professionals we excel at understanding protocols, standards, file-formats, and APIs. Whenever there is a doubt as to the correct way to do things, one merely needs to read the fine manual or source code.
Unfortunately the reference manual for humans was lost a long time ago, and the source code is poorly documented. We've been struggling with inter-human communication ever since.
Paul Fenwick will present his findings at reverse-engineering the human communication protocol.

Open Source communities are often full of "the one who invented ___" people. They've written RFCs, gotten patents, published software that's already installed on every computer you'll ever buy. It can be kind of intimidating. But there's room for more than that--and welcoming more people can improve your project exponentially!

When someone claims a task and then doesn't do anything with it, we call that "licking the cookie." Nobody in their right mind would pick up and eat the licked cookie or finish the project. In this session well talk about common forms of organizational dysfunction, and then facilitate a group discussion about working around, over, under or through organizational dysfunctions you've encountered.

Impostor syndrome -- the persistent belief that any minute everyone around you is going to figure out you're not at all qualified -- happens to a majority of the tech industry; nobody talks about it, because nobody wants to be the first to admit it. This talk confronts that feeling head-on, and addresses ways to readjust your perceptions of your accomplishments to accurately reflect reality.

An exploration of labor and ethics from various points in the life of a computer -- from the day-to-day software programming and hardware inside the computer down to the materials used in various components. Includes the implications for open source hardware and software as well as possible future solutions.

Creating a successful Open Source project isn’t intuitive, or easy. Converting a brilliant idea into a working code base, then publishing it to Github (with significant adoption) is hard enough, nevermind building an ideal development and release workflow.
Sometimes, getting your OSS code out to the community is the easy part -- then the real work ensues. Juggling between the roles of; creator, maintainer and contributor while managing the interests of the group effort (IRC, mailing lists etc) and issue trackers can quickly scale from simple and exciting, to a time consuming full time job.
I plan to take you on a ride, demonstrating how Open Source developers can leverage free service offerings (for open source) to make your life as a project maintainer easier and more rewarding; from development and QA automation through to continuous deployment.

The Multnomah County Library website has combined Drupal, Solr Search, Nginx, Varnish and a host of other technologies to build a highly scalable web infrastructure. The site takes advantage of responsive design techniques to provide patrons—the people who check out the books—with an impressive mobile experience.

Knuth advocated writing programs for people, not computers. How does crafting code with literate programming play with quick iterative development? Example heavy session using org-mode's Babel project and progrmming languages with succinct syntax, like Scala and Clojure.

Have you ever wanted to track your movements, sleep, what you eat, who you spend time with, and all sorts of other personal data? In this talk I'll describe the tools I've been able to successfully use to track aspects of my life.

Metrics tell us what our code and our systems are doing and how well they are performing. Proper instrumentation of our systems allows developers and sysadmins to have a better understanding of how code works in production settings.

Take control of your hardware by installing an open build of Android. Learn about what is involved in installing a third-party OS on your phone or tablet. Bring your own device to hack on in a supportive environment.

It's been scientifically proven that more diverse communities and workplaces create better products and the solutions to difficult problems are more complete and diverse themselves. Companies are struggling to find adequate talent. So why do we see so few women, people of color, and LGBTQ people at our events and on the about pages of our websites? Even more curiously, why do 60% of women leave the tech industry within 10 years? Why are fewer women choosing to pursue computer science and related degrees than ever before? Why have stories of active discouragement, dismissal, harassment, or worse become regular news?

Open source folks are passionate about the tools they make and want others to get involved. Yet, in the past year that I've been developing software full time, I've seen a wide variety of responses from maintainers. On one hand, I've been inspired by the Travis-CI maintainer who followed up with my bug report over several weeks, on the other hand, my pull request to JDBC has lain fallow.

In the spirit of open source, I'd like to shine a spotlight on depression. Not because it's easy, but because it's important. Mental illness affects many of us, but the stigma attached to it dissuades most people from talking about it openly. That's not how we make progress. With this talk, I want to do my part.

It's sad that in 2013, var_dump and die are still two of the most common debugging and reflection techniques in PHP. Let's explore the state of interactive debugging in PHP, compare it with what's available in other languages, and apply this with practical tools and techniques which can be used today.

All Unix/Linux users know a little shell scripting, even if they're unaware of it. Pipes, for example, are a part of the Bash/sh language. Bash/sh, i.e. shell scripting, is usually treated as just that: shell scripting. But if you're crazy enough, you can develop full-blown profession, modular, and tested (yes, tested!) programs in Bash. It takes a little finesse, but I'll show you how, and you just might think twice about using Bash--really using it--in the future.

Product Management is a generally well defined discipline inside large corporate organizations. But how does it work in the open source world? Do we need it? How does product consensus happen in open source?

Debugging: The schedule destroyer, the confidence sapper, the mire in which thousands of working hours are lost every day. It's time to stop staring at those four lines of code, desperately willing the bug to appear. This session is about the philosophies that will steer you around bugs, strategies for dealing with them, and tools that can shorten a four-hour debugging session to five minutes.

As the founder of a company focused on software testing, I speak often to developers who admit in private: "Yes, testing is important... but we don't test." Reasons vary, but the basic problem is that testing is seen as too difficult and time-consuming with no apparent value for the effort. In this talk I hope to convince you that this problem is a false dilemma and show you how to get started testing software quickly and easily.

Studying and building hardware is easier than you think. Using software concepts as a metaphor, I will reverse-engineer the 1982 arcade game machine "Robotron: 2084" and reimplement it in modern hardware.

Team dynamics are tricky. They're different when you're volunteering your time, when you're working for someone, or when you're trying to build something and invite someone else to build other good things too.

Conventional wisdom says that writing high-performance code means working without the safety net of credible compile-time safety checks. Mozilla Research (a community of researchers, engineers, and volunteers) is trying to prove that conventional wisdom wrong by building Rust, a new systems programming language. Rust takes advantage of well-understood programming language technology to combine aggressive compile-time error checking with the high degree of direct control over the machine necessary to write efficient systems programs. By way of examples, I'll teach you how to use Rust to write fast and trustworthy code.

Search-first writing makes you think about the structure of your document and product as a series of topics, instead of a big book. The days of linear documentation are over, or at least numbered. Users are much more likely to come to documentation through searches.
As an open source creator, you may not have a writer to help you out with this, so how can you maximize their return on your minimal investment?

Filipinos are known for sharing. From chain text messages, to photos, to videos, even to gossip and covering recent events in our own little communities, there seems to be an openness to sharing information: in fact, the Philippines is the so-called "social networking capital of the world". But can this openness to sharing information translate into the open source movement? I seek to provide possible answers to that question.

What happens when a project begins to embrace the philosophy that simple questions should have simple answers? Q: Simple to whom? A: Simple to the person asking the question. "Simple questions should have simple answers" has given me a lot of design clarity in my projects. I hope to convince you of its beneficial effects.

Yoga returns to Open Source Bridge! Come with your stiff shoulders, sore wrists, tight hips and aching back. Leave with ideas on how to incorporate 5 minutes of practice into your busy day to care for your body and mind.

With good study design you can state how confident you are that you have a cat. You can hypothesis test your cat--is my cat like other cats or is it a dog? You can even design an experiment to determine the correct feeding time for your cat.

Moving sites from your development environment to a staging or production server can be time-consuming and challenging. This session will provide you with easy-to-use tools and workflow to bridge the gap between development and operations.

FOSS can be a power for positive social impact in the developing world. Hear about key social impact projects and how the open source community can broaden its focus beyond the needs of western developers.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects have been hemorrhaging editors for the past five years. We're going to talk about the reasons why, how they can affect other projects, and what you can do to prevent it in yours.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of OSS projects. From behemoths like the Linux Foundation to every little project on SourceForge, volunteers keep things moving forward. Retaining happy and motivated volunteers is a crucial step in creating a healthy organization. In this talk, I will discuss the whys and wherefors of encouraging and directing your volunteers in the context of both traditional non-profits and OSS projects.

The Perl Renaissance is in full swing. Join internationally acclaimed speaker and White Camel Award winner Paul Fenwick as we explore some of the most freakin' amazing developments in the land of Perl!

Developing applications to handle the natural languages and written scripts of the world—or even a small handful of them—is an impressively large task. Fortunately, Unicode provides tools to do just that. It’s more than just a character set, it’s a collection of standards for working with the world’s textual data. The problem is: Unicode itself is complex!

Secure Boot is a technology for limiting the files that computers will boot. Used wrongly, it restricts user freedom and turns computers into appliances. How can we use it for real improvements in security without losing the ideals of general purpose computing?

Its a simple talk.
About Us.
We shall, explain things as they are around us, how we got into the community, give suggestions on how people can help more people get into the community from a similar environment.

"Asynchronous" or "non-blocking" frameworks like Tornado and Node.js are in fashion, but most programmers still don't have a rigorous understanding of what's meant by asynchronous, how these frameworks function, and when they're appropriate to use. I'll give a detailed tour of Tornado's event loop and show exactly how it works, and under what circumstances it's superior to a traditional multithreaded web server. You'll learn how to write the most efficient servers for modern apps with very large numbers of concurrent connections.

We're surrounded by programs we didn't write. Inevitably they eventually do the wrong thing, or they just don't do what we need, and we want to find out what they are doing. Learn how to spy on the processes you run.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"
- Author William Gibson
Whether rightly or wrongly so, it has been argued that the "information revolution' has resulted in a wider gap between those with skills and access to digital resources and those who do not. The same can apply to entire communities where language, geography and cultural barriers have created a new world of "Have Nots".
The growing civic hacker movement is making long strides towards eliminating the "silicon ceiling" effect, but thanks to the emerging practice of "open hardware" the "civic hacker" is joined by a new class known as the "maker"...
The civic hacker is capable of great things, and already has enough of a track record to be proud of. But the hacker ultimately is, and should remain, part of a vanguard elite who like the Bletchley Park codebreakers of WWII possess skills of such value that the work of a single individual can have a direct impact on the outcome of a war (or election...)
The "Maker" on the other hand represents a fundamental break from a passive society of consumers into something more closely resembling the small-scale producers and artisans on which the U.S was based on.

The OSU Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) and PSU Computer Action Team (theCAT) provides an amazing program for undergraduate students to learn about system administration. Many of our students have moved on and created their own successful startups and have changed the landscape of open source themselves. This session will cover how OSUOSL and theCAT mentor our students and create rock stars in the industry.